...Which is what I've done, however I've found that the POD is most lacking, especially in the weak justification that to eval 'expressions' is bad because the 'expressions' are recompiled at each invocation and generate no compile-time warnings. Well, gee. I already knew that, and maybe (just maybe) I actually want that behavior for a reason. Is that so crazy? Does that make me evil?

But that's not my biggest gripe. My gripe is that the POD explanation itself really ... left much to be desired, particularly for this error. Sureley there's something deeper; surely there's some better explanation about why it's bad to eval 'expressions' beyond the two that are provided in the POD. If those are the only reasons not to eval 'expressions', then I don't think it's a bad thing to do when you specificall want the behavior it provides in the first place. Being able to do so is arguably one of the most powerful uses for perl: it can run itself!

And no, I haven't gone hunting for it in the PBP book (yet) because, again, I have no real page number to reference. I'll see what I can search out later on. If it turns out there's a greater justification to be found, I'll submit a patch to the POD. Otherwise I'll continue to be grateful that I can eval 'expressions' with Perl, because I've found several times that this (bad?) practice has helped me create some really awesome things through the years. Very fast template parsers with support for embedded perl expressions are one thing that comes to mind.

I can appreciate your frustration when using Perl::Critic without a copy of PBP. Long ago, I asked O'Reilly if I could have permission to quote entire sections of their book in Perl::Critic's POD. They denied my request.

Soon after Perl::Critic was released, some folks wanted pages numbers for the French or German translations of the book. Others wanted links to pages on http://safari.oreilly.com instead of dead-tree page numbers. And now that we have all sorts of e-books, it is even harder to come up with a truly universal form of citation (which sounds like an interesting project in itself).

A stringy eval() is perfectly correct in some situations, usually having to do with dynamically generated bits of code. But in most other situations, a block eval is a better option.

All software is just the sum of a long series of decisions. Perl::Critic merely provides you with reasonable defaults for some of those decisions. But all those defaults will be wrong at some point. IMHO, mastering the language means understanding when and why they are wrong.

Ada Lovelace for the palindrome
Albert Einstein for having smelly feet
Alfred Nobel for his contribution to battlefield science
Burkhard Heim for providing the missing link between science and mysticism
Claude Shannnon for riding a unicycle at night at MIT
Donald Knuth for being such a great organist
Edward Teller for being the template for Dr. Strangelove
Edwin Hubble for pretending to be a pipe-smoking English gentleman
Erwin Schrödinger for cruelty to cats
Hedy Lamarr for weaponizing pianos
Hugh Everett for immortality, especially for cats
Isaac Newton for his occult studies
Kikunae Ikeda for discovering the secrets of soy sauce
Larry Wall for his website
Louis Camille Maillard for discovering why steaks taste good
Marie Curie for the shiny stuff
Nikola Tesla for the cool cars
Paul Dirac for speaking one word per hour when socializing
Richard Feynman for his bongo skills
Robert Oppenheimer for his in-depth knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita
Rusi P Taleyarkhan for Cold Fusion
Sigmund Freud for his Ménage ā trois
Theodor W Adorno for his contribution to the reception of jazz
Wilhelm Röntgen for the foundations of body scanners
Yulii Borisovich Khariton for the Tsar Bomba
Other (please explain why)